Month: August, 2012

Next year it will be 18 years since Richard Richard “Richie Richard” Richard and Eddie Hitler last graced our television screens.

Long enough for a generation to be born, learn to walk and talk, grow up, go to school, nearly learn to read, leave school and register for job seekers’ allowance all without having experienced the wit and wisdom of two of comedy’s greatest characters.

All that is about to change as we find out what happened to two titans of comedy, Richie and Eddie. Are they still wandering round and round Hammersmith roundabout looking for a safe place to cross? Are they still living in one of the dirtiest and least hygienic flats uncondemned by Health and Safety? Are they still drinking neat furniture polish whilst hitting each other over the head with large metal objects, setting fire to each other’s private parts and other areas as they seek to impress gullible members of the opposite sex, and each other? Or are they down the pub?

No, they are abandoned, lost and shipwrecked on a tropical hell hole that is Hooligans’ Island, although they are still hitting each other over the head with large metal objects, still chasing women, (even though there are none on the island) and still waiting for that job seekers’ allowance cheque as they distil something quite like alcohol, only worse.

And they are back on BBC Two in 2013 for six new 30-minute episodes starring Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson. Be afraid. Be very afraid. And a bit bilious.

Rik Mayall says: “How much am I getting paid? Are there any birds in it? And that horrific arse-brained Edmondson’s not in it again is he? Oh, God help me… no, no, alright then, I’ll do it. That useless, foul smelling waste of space and oxygen is really going to get it this time. This is the big one. Tell the audience to brace themselves.”

Ade Edmondson said: “It’s been a while since I last worked with that complete b****** Rik Mayall and I’m very much looking forward to bashing him about the head with various blunt objects. It’s the only language he understands.”

Commissioned by Janice Hadlow, Controller, BBC Two and Mark Freeland, Head of BBC In-House Comedy, Hooligans’ Island will be a BBC Comedy co-production with Phil McIntyre Television. It will be executive produced by Mark Freeland and produced by Jon Plowman.

New series was announced at the Edinburgh International Television Festival

The boys from Bottom are back in a new show which sees Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson revive their cult characters Richie Rich and Eddie Hitler.

The pair have swapped their filthy flat for the sandy shores of a tropical island in the six-part series.

Edmondson said: “It’s been a while since I last worked with that complete b****** Rik Mayall and I’m very much looking forward to bashing him about the head with various blunt objects. It’s the only language he understands.”

The show, called Hooligans Island, will be on BBC2 next year.

The last series of Bottom aired in 1995. In 2008 it was voted 45th in a ‘Britain’s Best Sitcom’ BBC poll.

It is one of a series of new comedy commissions announced at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

It has been nearly two decades since Richie Rich and Eddie Hitler last graced our television screens in cult hit, Bottom.

Now 18 years on BBC2 is reuniting Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson for a new series of Bottom.

For viewers wondering what ever happened to the loutish characters the new six-part series will show how their lives turned out.

It seems Eddie and Richie – now in their forties – have been shipwrecked on a tropical hell hole dubbed ‘Hooligans Island’.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘They are still hitting each other over the head with large metal objects, still chasing women, even though there are none on the island, and still waiting for that job seekers allowance cheque as they distil something quite like alcohol, only worse.’

Bottom was a cult hit for BBC2 in the 1990s and was famed for its nihilistic humour and violent slapstick.

The pair lived on government benefits in a grotty Hammersmith bedsit and spent their time attacking each other or consuming toxic substances.

Joy of joys! Bottom, Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson’s riot of slapstick, toilet humour and existentialism is to be revived on BBC2.

However the show’s new series won’t be taking place in Richie and Eddie’s grotty Hammersmith flat. It’ll be set instead on the tropical island which played host to messrs Rich and Hitler in the 1997 Bottom stage show, Hooligan’s Island.

The format for the new series, which is to be called Hooligan’s Island rather than Bottom, will be little-altered though, as the Beeb promises that the pair will still be clobbering one another with large metal objects and chasing women in spite of the island being deserted.

Demonstrating a rapport that remains unchanged since their early Comedy Store days as The Dangerous Brothers, Rik and Ade both greeted the announcement of their reunion with characteristic aplomb.

Rik said: “How much am I getting paid? Are there any birds in it? And that horrific arse-brained Edmondson’s not in it again is he? Oh, God help me… no, no, alright then, I’ll do it.

“That useless, foul smelling waste of space and oxygen is really going to get it this time. This is the big one. Tell the audience to brace themselves.”

His co-star echoed Mayall’s sentiments, in a way, saying: “It’s been a while since I last worked with that complete b****** Rik Mayall and I’m very much looking forward to bashing him about the head with various blunt objects. It’s the only language he understands.”

It’s been 18 years since Bottom was last on air but finally, after almost two decades away, Richie and Eddie will make their TV comeback in 2013. As the Corporation says: “Be afraid. Be very afraid. And a bit bilious.”

When Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders joined the Comic Strip in 1980, a new genre of comedy was born. There were already two other double acts in the ensemble – Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall, and Peter Richardson and Nigel Planer – with Alexei Sayle as compère. Their regular venue was a spare stage at Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar, a strip club in Soho. The group also toured and, two years later, they made a half-hour film, Five Go Mad in Dorset, a parody of the Enid Blyton story which was shown on the opening night of Channel 4 on November 2. It was to be the first of 41 such self-contained films, including a satire about the miners’ strike, which won the Golden Rose of Montreux, and the ‘rockumentary’ Bad News. Most were written and directed by Peter Richardson and, over the years, the line-up was to include such comic luminaries as Robbie Coltrane, Keith Allen and Lenny Henry. On the 30th anniversary of that first fateful meeting in Soho, Nigel Farndale talks to some of the cast.

Six go mad in a Soho strip club

Jennifer Saunders: ‘Dawn and I had had a double act at college and we had a dream of becoming cruise ship entertainers. But I was out of work and she was teaching so we answered an advert in The Stage. The Comic Strip was boys only when we arrived and, being politically correct, they needed some girls in the line up, but it didn’t feel like we were token women because we did think we were funny enough. I don’t know why it didn’t seem strange working above a strip club, but it didn’t. Soho was different in those days, it was much less crowded.’

Dawn French: ‘The Raymond Revue Bar as a venue was a happy accident. Someone knew someone who knew Paul Raymond and he had this spare theatre. The group was already called the Comic Strip when Jen and I joined. So essentially it was three double acts, Jennifer and me, Ade and Rik, Nigel and Pete.’

Rowland Rivron: ‘Bunch of stuck up gits, weren’t they?’

Nigel Planer: ‘Alexei Sayle was the main star when we were there and the rest of us were B team to him.’

Peter Richardson: ‘It started as a club, a group who had this energy and I think there was a feeling that if we got together the collective force of this group would make it work.’

Planer: ‘The Raymond Revue Bar was a strange place because in the interval our non-racist, non-sexist audience would walk into the bar where there were soft-porn videos playing. A most paradoxical venue.’

Saunders: ‘We had two separate changing rooms, one for the girls and one for the boys. Theirs stank because they never washed their costumes.’

French: ‘The audience was hip, that was the great thing. You looked out and there were all these floaty, New Romantics and among them people like Robin Williams, Bianca Jagger and Jack Nicholson.’

Head of BBC entertainment Paul Jackson: ‘In a way the Comic Strip became the new punk because there was an anger. Keith Allen once threw beer over an Evening Standard critic.’

Saunders: ‘All the rumours about Dawn and I were true. We were pretty crap back then. We’d change our act every night. It took us a long time to realise the boys were using the same material every night because the audiences changed every night. Having two years to work together as an ensemble before the first TV film was very useful. We had the same sensibility.’

‘We’ll have those six and the fat one!’

Mayall: ‘It was Pete who was the driving force, he got us round a table and we signed something on a menu.’

Planer: ‘Pete did the deal with Channel 4 without telling us.’

Commissioning editor for Channel 4 Mike Bolland: ‘They came to us with six ideas, all elaborate pastiches. Having seen the acts in the Comic Strip I thought it was a really exciting prospect for television. The cheek of taking on an icon like Enid Blyton appalled some people.’

Edmondson: ‘Channel 4 was being born, and it was pure luck for them and us because we provided them with something on a plate. “We’ll have those six and the fat one!”’

Sayle: ‘Pete was very determined and possibly Machiavellian in a way an auteur has to be. Initially, we had a meeting at his house where it was agreed that everything would be decided by a single, non-transferable vote based on the parliamentary system of Finland. A few weeks later we get these pay cheques from Peter Richardson Ltd.’

Richardson: ‘I tried to be as democratic as I could be, given the fascist state I lived in. We all took the same money and still do. As for warring egos, mine was probably bigger than any of theirs. They were all quite reasonable.’

Lenny Henry: ‘The first one was completely anarchic and irreverent to the Enid Blyton stories, but also strangely quaint and true to the form.’

French: ‘For the films that followed that first one, the boys took every opportunity to play guitars, throw grenades or shag girls.’

Saunders: ‘Half wanted to be rock stars, the other [half] Clint Eastwood.’

Mayall: ‘I got blisters on my fingers from cocking guns and my ankles swelled up from wearing spurs, and my hat kept blowing off and I couldn’t chase it because my ankles were swollen.’

French: ‘It was a group that fell into working together with guidance from Pete, who was ambitious, not to be famous but to make films. A lot of the Comic Strips are parodies of film genres.’

Coltrane: ‘I had to sleep with Peter Richardson to land the role, but we all did once. He used to write with Pete Richens. Their shooting was just something that interrupted their writing. When I phoned them I was always told they were out in the shed writing, at least it was assumed they were writing.’

Pete Richens: ‘Peter was the boss, I was just a mechanic who helped make his ideas work. We write either side of the same table. More grown-up writers work separately then get together. But we just slog it out.’

French: ‘Peter and Pete wrote the most, mainly because they were megalomaniacs. The rest of us would get what was left over.’

Saunders: ‘Also they could write, that was the other thing.’

French: ‘On location we were prepared to work all the hours God sent and we slept on the set sometimes. It was a halcyon time. Getting paid the same meant you could write a film with someone in mind for the role without worrying that someone else in the group would miss out on the pay.’

Keith Allen: ‘No one had done that format before. You didn’t shoot half-hour comedies with an ensemble team. Before it was the Oxbridge axis of Monty Python and Not the Nine O’Clock News. So this was new.’

Planer: ‘The documentary feel tied in with what we were doing in the clubs. Later, Steve Coogan and Mrs Merton used that technique, inventing a character and putting it in seemingly real contexts.’

Henry: ‘Peter didn’t want studio audiences, he preferred locations. Comedies like Little Britain and The Fast Show wouldn’t have had the look they had, were it not for the Comic Strip.’

Coltrane: ‘The viewing figures were never very good, I think three and a half million was the most. But having said that, most of those three and a half million could recite the whole show the next week. They were a dedicated following.’

Edmondson: ‘Bad News was based on my experience of school rock bands. Everyone thinks it was stolen from Spinal Tap but it actually predated Spinal Tap by six months.’

Stand-offs, tussles and ‘Mad Pete’

Richardson: ‘Somewhere there is a lot of footage of us arguing on the Bad News tour bus. You could stick it in a Bad Newsepisode and you wouldn’t know, apart from we were more intelligent and didn’t have the wigs on. EMI gave us a recording contract and we played live at Castle Donington in front of 60,000 people. It was eight in the morning and the crowd was throwing bottles at us. It was like four comedians going out into the Coliseum.’

Mayall: ‘When Bad News played Donington was when life began imitating art. Nigel and I had such a row over sound levels on stage.’

French: ‘Ade was funny, complex and profound; Rik was not only hilarious but also quite beautiful with the clearest, hugest eyes. Nigel was the most fastidious, employing proper techniques to find the right character and actually learning the bloody lines! Mad Pete was our Clint Eastwood, brooding, lip-chewing, anxious and utterly committed to making film. We once got into a stand-off about a line I was supposed to deliver in Susie in 1984, which we all agreed should be changed because it was lame. He agreed but on the day he hadn’t changed it and I refused to say it. It ended in full-on squaddie style screams of obscenities from both of us, then we began prodding each other, then a tussle ensued. The episode served to confirm to me Pete’s complex passion for our films. He is one of those people who is nine parts genius to one part knob, and I say this as one of his closest friends!’

Saunders: ‘Sometimes they looked like an art film, sometimes a sitcom. There was a lot of diversity.’

‘I once played Meryl Streep playing Mrs Scargill’

French: ‘Jen and I were always made to wear short skirts, fishnets and high heels by Peter, even if we were playing a lumberjack.’

Planer: ‘I played the bums, the hippies, the ageing perverts and strange agents, and anally retentive people in wigs. Pete has a strange take on the world. You found yourself giving a quirky, odd performance.’

French: ‘Explosions happened a lot, usually to finish the story because we didn’t have any endings.’

Saunders: ‘I was always in awe of the proper actors who came into it because they would concentrate and learn their lines. I would be thinking: “What’s for lunch?”’

Coltrane: ‘We wouldn’t do anything for a year then all come together again and it was like a family reunion, on location in some hotel, catching up and getting p—-d for a week.’

Richardson: ‘There was a point where each of them had their own series and getting them together for the Comic Strip became harder.’

Mayall: ‘You’d get a call from Peter saying: “Do you want to be in a film?” and you would say yes and he would say:“Right, come round this afternoon we’re shooting” and I would say: “But I can’t, I’m doing The New Statesman.”’

Coltrane: ‘Peter always got really hurt if you said you were working on something else like Cracker.’

French: ‘It became a little complicated when we got other careers. They made it messier because Peter wanted us to be available to start for whenever he had put the money together. It was very slapdash in that way, we never knew dates. It was up in the air, so I had to drop in my bread and butter work, and just hope I would be available for Peter. Whatever else we were doing, we would always come back to do films with Peter. He is very persuasive, by fair means or foul.’

Saunders: ‘We would go and sleep in Peter’s mum’s farmhouse in Devon or share bunk beds in cottages. It was a real collaboration, a family feeling. Often they were weirder roles, rather than comic roles. I had no idea what The Beat Generationwas about when we were filming it. Like I said, I was more interested in the catering. Free food! There wasn’t a sense back then that you had to fit in with what a committee of executives wanted, which is what the BBC is like now. You were creatively left to your own devices.’

French: ‘It could get very bizarre, I once played Cher playing Joan Ruddock.’

Saunders: ‘So many weird layers. The peeling of the orange when I was playing Meryl Streep playing Mrs Scargill was based on something I read about Streep, that she had this knack for pulling focus, even when she didn’t have a line in the scene.’

French: ‘It was great being in a minority of girls. If Peter had anything to do with it you would either be an old bag with hairy moles or you were in fishnet tights with stilettos. No one was saying you were the wrong shape or height or age. It was an adult version of being let loose with the dressing up box.’

Saunders: ‘It was the happiest, happiest time. We would film ridiculous hours, finish at two in the morning then back filming at six, but you were young and you didn’t mind. It was a great learning curve. With the Comic Strip you got to learn how it was made. You were hanging around with the director and sitting in on script meetings. Sometimes Peter could be a hard taskmaster because he writes in a particular way but there was always scope to put in other jokes. There was one called War, I never really did work out what that was about.’

Richardson: ‘We tried to cast against type. In Five Go Mad we asked Ronald Allen, who was famous for Crossroads, to play Uncle Quentin as a “screaming homosexual”. I remember asking him and he said he would do it so long as he could carry a cane and I said: “You have a deal.”’

Family ties (and a bit of snogging)

Saunders: ‘There was a great sense of family, really, although I wasn’t married to Ade until the Comic Strip was almost finished. During the making of Comic Strip we weren’t really an item, that wasn’t until Supergrass, the feature film. We were constantly having to snog the other members of the cast, which was delightful. I think Dawn got more snogging in than me. She always had the raunchier parts. A lot of Peter’s women were larger than life, lot of red lipstick. When he mimed the woman he wanted you to play it was all hand on hip and applying lipstick.’

Richardson: ‘Four Men in a Plane in 2000 was one of our better ones, I don’t think that’s aged. We showed a couple at a comedy festival a couple of months ago, The Crying Game, about a gay footballer, and Detectives on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, and they got huge laughs.’

Edmondson: ‘At the beginning there was a poster calling us “guerrillas of humour”, and there was an idea that we were fighting against Thatcher and this dreadful oppression and people thought we were having an effect, and sure enough, just 17 years later we got rid of her, just as our careers were beginning to wane.’

Richardson: ‘I do get people saying: “The Comic Strip is the reason I got into comedy.” We’re still going, about to do an anniversary series. Six very different films again, we’re going to bring some younger people in Five Go Mad 30 years on, and another political satire like The Strike.’

Edmondson: ‘Peter is a very good writer. He invented a new genre of satire, a Hollywood version of a non-Hollywood story, like Strike and GLC and his own film, Churchill: The Hollywood Years.’

Planer: ‘In Four Men in a Plane there is a five-minute developing shot, which is an incredible piece of film directing, compared to the crude directing of the early episodes.’

Edmondson: ‘Four Men in a Plane, filmed on location in Spain, was the first time Peter and I had a standup row, I kept making this line funnier. I rebelled. He always presses you to do what he wants to do and not think for yourself, and he is usually right!’

Planer: ‘I thought, where have I heard this row before? Then I realised it was 15 years ago and I just thought: “This is fantastic!” [Laughter] It’s the old team still having the same old rows. I love this. I’m with my mates in a field in Spain.’

Coltrane: ‘I think they were all very lucky to get to work with me, to be honest. What happened to French and Saunders?’